News

Ah, new year prediction posts. We’ve dabbled, to be sure. The format can be yawn-inducing, but within some of these lists, one finds truly thought-provoking glimpses into an imagined future. That’s why we’re going to alter the criteria a bit here to favor the fascinating over the likely. What follows are five of the most interesting 2015 marketing predictions I’ve encountered, my corresponding commentary, and one of my own predictions. Learn More...

2015 is going to be a big year here at Pley. We continue to work around the clock in order to improve our service for all of you, our members. This week, two new features were released on pley.com! Learn more...

SEATTLE, Jan. 15, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Tango Card and H&R Block tax software announce a strategic relationship to provide additional value to H&R Block do-it-yourself clients, using one of H&R Block's online or desktop software solutions. H&R Block clients who e-file their federal income tax return and are eligible for a refund have the ability to get even more this season through the new H&R Block refund bonus program. Learn More...

Spredfast Inc. has earned a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award as part of the ceremony held in Las Vegas during the International Consumer Electronics Show.

The award came in the area of "innovation in improving engagement around television and social media, which also recognized Twitter as a winner. The award was technically given to Mass Relevance Inc., which has since merged with Spredfast, for its work on campaigns such as President Barack Obama's Twitter town hall meeting to social media work focused around the 2014 World Cup.

The presentation is scheduled for Tuesday, January 13, 2015 at 12:05 p.m. Eastern Time, or 11:05 a.m. Central Time. A live webcast, as well as a replay, of the presentation will be accessible from the investor relations page of the Bazaarvoice website at investors.bazaarvoice.com.

KANSAS CITY, MO--(Marketwired - December 08, 2014) - H&R Block (HRB), premiering itsredesigned online and software products today, will offer do-it-yourself filers unrivaled real-time detail and insight into their refund with the new Refund Reveal℠ tool as well as a bonus on top of their federal refund of up to 10 percent at more than 40 retailers.

Austin, TX - May 20, 2014 - Spredfast, the most comprehensive social marketing platform, today announced it is participating in the Pinterest MarTech Developer alpha, which includes official access to the Pinterest Business Insights API. The alpha initiative complements the wide range of analytic tools already available in the Spredfast platform. Spredfast can now provide brands with previously unavailable insights about their performance, impact and community engagement on Pinterest. Armed with a deeper understanding of the content that appeals most to Pinners, brands can now tailor their content strategy to drive the most engagement on Pinterest. With access to the Pinterest Business Insights API, Spredfast customers can now identify the most frequently pinned content on their official website, garnering valuable information to develop and amplify content that resonates most with Pinners, as well as apply those learnings to various relevant aspects of their marketing. Specifically, through the Spredfast Social Inbox, customers will be able to monitor repins with an in-depth look at the virality of content across their own Pinterest boards as well as their website. Additionally, Spredfast customers can tag pins and categorize them by campaign for easy management and performance review.

Tim’s addition enhances an already deep bench of talent within the leadership team at Spredfast. It also demonstrates our commitment to establishing efficient and effective business platforms that will enable us to execute on all of our customer commitments around the world.

— Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast

Austin, TX - Spredfast, the most comprehensive social marketing platform, today announced the appointment of Tim Barker as Chief Financial Officer. Tim has more than two decades of experience developing and managing financial and accounting organizations for public and private businesses operating in high growth environments.

Vicinity is capable of recognizing when customers and their mobile device are near a Vicinity-enabled online payment or checkout experience. When the customers’ mobile phone is in the vicinity of the online shopping session, for example on a tablet or PC, Vicinity is presented as a payment option. The customer inserts their PIN and the purchase is completed. There is no requirement for the consumer to remember a login and password or to use a time consuming and cumbersome guest-checkout experience. More secure than typical online shopping sessions, Vicinity uses multi-factor authentication of customers including the customers PIN, mobile phone and location as factors. Secure storage of customer credentials is managed in SALTs PCI compliant cloud infrastructure.

“With Vicinity completing a transaction is as easy as entering 1-2-3. SALT’s focus has been to create and process simple and secure payment experiences for customers. Vicinity builds on what we originally launched with our patented OneTouch mobile payment technology,” says Brian Bogosian, CEO of SALT. “For merchants, Vicinity provides a new way to simplify payment experiences for customers and to increase sales conversions. With our analytics capabilities, Merchants will also have the power to retarget customers across any form-factor in situations where purchases are abandoned, giving them additional opportunity to convert sales. Vicinity can be integrated across any payment gateway or processor.”

“SALT has built its OneTouch payment platform around fast, simple and secure payment experiences for consumers, which in turn will drive increased conversions for merchants. Reducing friction in transactions and delighting consumers creates a bigger market for merchants, which is core to our mission,” said Brian Bogosian, CEO of SALT. “We are very excited to continue our record of delivering innovative solutions to to the payments industry.”

This marks the next generation of SALT’s OneTouch payment platform. Originally launched in 2010, the latest version of OneTouch brings a number of new features along with an award winning new User Interface.

SALT will be at Money2020 November 2nd to 5th, 2014, showcasing its technology for customers and partners. SALT will be at booth 915 at the Aria Convention Hall.

SALT Technology, Inc., (http://www.salt.com); providing the industry’s most complete, cloud-based mobile payments platform, today announced that it continues to add leading Bitcoin and crypto-currency exchanges as clients for its payment platform.

SALT’s cloud based payment platform has now been selected by many of the worlds leading Bitcoin Exchanges to provide, fast, easy and secure processing of transactions of crypto currencies.

— Brian A. Bogosian, CEO of SALT Technology

“SALT’s solution made sense for our customers and to Vault of Satoshi as a business” said Meg Curry, Manager at Vault of Satoshi. “This was a new, innovative way to support QuadrigaCX customers from a payment perspective, we are seeing increased growth in usage from our customer base” said Gerald Cotten, Founder and CEO and co-founder of QuadrigaCX. “SALT has a great payment solution for CAVIRTEX to integrate for our customers, SALT’s platform made it simple, they are the leading provider of this payment method” said Joseph Onorati, Compliance Officer of CAVIRTEX.

In an SEC filing today, we learn that Other Machine Co., a startup focusing on fabrication, has collected $1.18 million of a proposed $3 million round.

San Francisco-based Other Machine Co. is all about desktop manufacturing. Like 3D printer companies, it wants to make innovation and invention in hardware something anyone can do in their spare time and space.

The company produces small computer numerical controlled (CNM) machines, starting with Othermill, a 15-pound, 10-inch cube that creates circuit boards, ice cube trays, etc. by cutting out small pieces of physical material one layer at a time. (So, it’s kind of the opposite of a 3D printer, which molds material according to a design — kind of like the difference between negative and positive space.

Subscription commerce — a business model where customers pay a subscription fee and in return receive a product delivered to them on a recurring basis — is a growing trend [Opens in a new window] in the retail industry. Startups like Birchbox and Dollar Shave Club are prime examples of companies that are succeeding with a subscription commerce-based approach.

LUSH Cosmetics [Opens in a new window] is the latest company to try to cash in on the subscription commerce phenomenon. The retailer of handmade skin care, hair care, and bath and body products launched its subscription commerce program in August. LUSH is using OrderGroove's [Opens in a new window] Subscription Retail Platform to manage the program.

OrderGroove, the leader in subscription commerce solutions, and BrandShop (formerly SureSource LLC) have partnered to offer a subscription program to Clif Bar & Company customers onhttp://www.ClifBarStore.com. BrandShop selected OrderGroove as a partner based on the company’s innovative subscription technology and award-winning expertise in driving sales and lifetime value via subscriptions.

OrderGroove was the ideal business and technology partner for this project as their subscription and e-commerce expertise made the implementation and monitoring of the program a breeze.

Clif Bar & Company, the maker of CLIF® Bar energy bars, is the latest in a line of satisfied BrandShop clients utilizing OrderGroove’s Subscription Retail Platform® to convert new and existing customers into repeat buyers. To ensure program growth and success, OrderGroove's team of Subscription Marketing Experts & Data Analysts continuously monitor and optimize each program - maximizing subscription revenue, ensuring brand loyalty, and guaranteeing peak order-over-order retention rates.

Winning ways: Sharp focus on lifetime value guides Alvo's strategy at OrderGroove, a subscription-purchase platform for more than 75 major consumer brands. Delivering strong, ultra-loyal customer segments for brands and raising $10 million in venture capital have kept OrderGroove at the forefront of the scheduled-payment discussion. He was twice before honored by Direct Marketing News and received the eTail Rising Stars honor in 2013, but is kept grounded in reality by wife Caroline and dog Bleecker.

Defining moment: “The day I quit my job at liquidation.com to start OrderGroove in 2008. I knew I wanted to get back to building businesses, and letting go of the comfort of a paycheck forced me to get going.”

When you hear the phrase “social influencer” you may think of a trendy new marketing fad, but they have always existed. They were your local DJs, fashionistas, socialites and friends. Social media has given rise to a new breed of social influencers capable of driving 16 times more engagement with your target audience than paid or owned media programs.

Social influencers can provide a cost-effective way for startups and smaller businesses operating on a limited marketing budget to reach new customers. However, like any campaign, there are crucial steps that need to be followed to ensure your brand and product are presented to the right audience and by the right influencers.

What do Kia, Microsoft, and 20th Century Fox have in common? Yes, they’re all notable brands, but they also have enormous influence in the digital arena. While you might assume their social media influence is on accident, they’ve actually had some help from a company called twtMob.

twtMob identifies and manages influential publishers that deliver brand messages in their voice, to the right audience, at the right time, with the right content. This gives brands a warm invite into the “inner circle of social”, according to their site.

Marketers spend gobs of money and even more time trying to devise ways to engage people with a particular brand. Not enough of them realize music might be the best way to do that — and that Feed Media could be music to their ears.

Feed Media (aka Feed.fm) launched a “music-as-a-service” platform that allows companies to employ music on their websites, games, and mobile apps, as well as provide statistics on how people are engaging with a brand. Some of the startup’s clients include Budweiser, GameSalad, Starr Hill Brewery, and others. And today, the company has secured a new $1.2 million round, according to an SEC form D document.

“Music is a hard business to be in, but we’re not consumer-facing. We’re making it easy for business to legally use music to engage with customers,” Feed Media founder and Feed.fm CEO Jeff Yasuda told VentureBeat in an interview.

Edgecase is trying to make the online shopping experience friendlier and smarter — closer, perhaps, to what it’s like to shop with a salesperson who understands your needs and is totally knowledgeable about what’s in-stock.

The company was previously known as Compare Metrics, but it’s relaunching today with a new name and an upgraded product.

To describe the problem that Edgecase is trying to solve, co-founder and CEO Garrett Eastham noted that the conversion rates (i.e., the percentage of visitors who actually buy something) of online stores lag badly behind those of physical stores, something he attributed to the fact that “today’s digital commerce platforms were designed by database engineers not shoppers.”

For the past two years, the Compare Metrics team has been working relentlessly on a single goal — to get the retail industry to rethink the way consumers make purchasing decisions. This is a mission that started more than five years ago in my dorm room and has served as our blue flame since the company’s inception in 2012. I’ve always felt that the online search experience, as we know it today, needs to evolve. Over the past two years we’ve been diligently working with some of the world’s most innovative and thought-leading brands to help define precisely what that evolutionary path looks like.

And what have we learned? Our research and results to-date have shown us that people want to “discover” things on their own, yet they also want to be inspired They want to be in control of their digital experiences, whether they know exactly what they want or what they’re simply wanting to explore. They don’t want to be targeted “at” by retailers and brands; they’d rather target the ideal product themselves. For many of our merchants, this requires a paradigm shift in the way they think about their art and craft. Instead of limiting the number of options, digital merchandising must evolve to enable more degrees of expression and relevancy.